Teach your kids these steps to keep online scammers away

My father was recently the victim of a phishing scam. Like millions before him, he was convinced to pass along some sensitive information after receiving what appeared to be a legitimate email from his banking institution. He was asked to “confirm” his account and ended up giving away his social security number, his mother’s maiden name and other personal information.

Luckily, he quickly realized he was scammed, so he let my sister know, and she shut down all his bank and credit card accounts before reconstructing the accounts with new passwords.

My dad, in his late 70s, is part of an easy demographic target group for phishers – as are my children – and the experience got me to thinking (again) about how best to teach my children to protect themselves again cyber-crimes like phishing and other forms of identity theft.

Phishing attacks don’t appear to be going away anytime soon. One reported cited more than 37 million people as being targeted for phishing attacks in 2012. And, a rather stunning statistic shows that those under 19 are increasingly targets. One group – ID Analytics – reports that more than 140,000 children are victims of identity theft each year.

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There are many levels to protecting your children and teaching responsible online behavior. It runs the gamut from telling your kids that they should only be friending true friends on Facebook to making sure that both your sons and daughters aren’t sending inappropriate photos to others. The advice from the FTC is simple: Don’t use email to transmit personal information. Yet, younger people tend to be a little more trusting and aren’t necessarily in the mindset of questioning everything they receive electronically.

Some of the suggestions and guidelines out there are basic but are definitely worth sharing with your kids. Hopefully, by training them earlier in life they will not run into the problems my dad has had later in life. Here are a few protective suggestions that I found worth discussing with kids:

Mashable and others point out that even Facebook is being used as a tool for phishers:

The scam works when a user clicks on what looks like a link from a friend in a tweet or post. That link takes them to a fake Facebook page where they can log in. They are then are asked to verify a bunch of information — that’s where the worst damage can occur. The user is asked to enter credit card information, down to the security code.

Another reminder from Mashable and others is to have your kids get into the mindset of checking out the URLs on information they receive. Most business organizations will use the more secure “https” over “http” and many phishing attempts come from nonsensical URLs, or those with file extensions other than “.com”.

Other strong suggestions include keeping computers out of your kids’ bedrooms. I like this idea a lot, but it’s been tough to do with my teenagers. My 15-year-old son brings his laptop into his room at night, and his two younger sisters bring their Kindles. The ability for parents to monitor behavior disappears when this happens, and I think I’m going to have to make a change to address the problem.

Finally, Brian Krebs, whose blog “Krebs on Security,” is the authority on cyber-crime and safety, provides a list of tips that just might be worth printing out and posting on your kids’ computers. (Full disclosure: Brian and I were colleagues at The Washington Post.)

Krebs reminds everyone to be skeptical and question almost everything you don’t recognize over email. “Don’t click on links in emails or open attachments unless you are sure the sender is trustworthy,” reads one of his tips.

That sense of caution is really what we need to pass along to our kids. Teenagers come to technology and the Web with a sense of awe and wonderment, and many times we see a great amount of creativity sparked by so many possibilities. But, we as parents have to tempter that impulse a bit to make them understand that some people are out there hoping to use technology to scam them.